Chase Hughes

The episode opens with Joe Rogan saying he wanted to talk to Chase Hughes after watching videos in which Hughes described an intravenous DMT experience. Rogan called it one of the most insane descriptions of any experience he had seen online.

Hughes explains the setup. The DMT was made by one person and delivered through a pump he compares to an operating-room anesthesia pump, with the dose adjusted in milliliters per hour. He says the dose could be raised or lowered on request, which he calls adjusting your altitude. For a bathroom break, the facilitators brought him down, and afterward he could go back up as high and as fast as he wanted. The session lasted five and a half hours and included one break. He describes it as the most intense DMT state, held for the whole session.

Hughes says that next time he plans to combine the infusion with Alzheimer's drugs, to see whether they help him retrieve and "bring back" more of what he experiences. This is a stated plan, not a result. He gives no specific drug, dose, or outcome.

Rogan compares it to his own dreams. They feel crystal clear when he wakes, but by the time he has used the bathroom and had coffee he can barely hold onto them. He suggests there may be "a protective layer" that blocks this kind of memory. His evidence is a contrast: he says he remembers everything about a UFC fight that weekend, yet a far more profound DMT experience slips away. That point is Rogan's own speculation.

Rogan brings up a serious academic, whose name he can't recall, who he thinks did about 100 DMT trips. That academic concluded that the visions are produced by the visual cortex, the brain, and the imagination. Hughes pushes back with a question: if it is all imagination, why don't people see ordinary places like Walmart, Target, or a 7-Eleven, the way they sometimes do in dreams? Rogan partly disagrees. He suggests the disorientation and the need to sit still may be part of the answer, and he notes there are contrarians on both sides. Neither of them settles the question.

Hughes points to Rogan's earlier guest Andrew Gallimore and his idea of a "world-making" part of the brain, which Hughes says hooked him. Hughes describes the end of his roughly six-hour session as the loss of reality itself.

on camera, I asked if I was dead 39 times.

He says he wasn't worried about the answer. Near the end he was crying, because coming back seemed to require wrapping himself in some ego again, and that made him not want to return at all.

Rogan compares Hughes's reluctance to return to what he calls Avatar Depression. He says that after the film came out, enough viewers were depressed about not living in its peaceful forest world that therapists began using the name. A 1990s "Truman Show syndrome" also comes up in the exchange. Both are mentioned in passing, with no clinical sources. Hughes says his own experience felt like that, "Times 10,000."

Hughes says the night before the session, his wife Michelle chose the vial. While he was in another room, the DMT maker asked whether she wanted to pray over it, and she did. He says he didn't know this at the time.

He describes what happened first in the session. Alien beings, "or whatever," pinned him down and opened him from pelvis to neck, and he could hear his organs moving. Then a large drill bit seemed to go up his nose to the back of his head. He says there was no pain, it felt freezing cold, and it lasted about 45 minutes. Afterward Michelle told him she had asked for his heart and brain to be fixed. He says he has a heart issue and a brain disease, and that the brain disease is why he did the session.

I'm not saying there's causation.

Rogan asks whether Hughes has been checked to see if anything changed. Hughes says he hasn't. He explains that it would need a PET scan, and he objects to the radiation, saying he couldn't hug or sleep near his wife or their two-year-old for about 48 hours afterward. So the story is untested by his own account.

Hughes names his brain condition as mesial temporal sclerosis and says he had a seizure the night before the session. Rogan recalls that on an earlier visit Hughes credited methylene blue with helping. Rogan says companies have since cut that clip into their own ads. Hughes replies that he is used to ads using him to sell everything "from coffee makers to hard on pills." He then says that if he skips methylene blue for a couple of days, he quickly goes back into "seizure territory." This is his personal report, not a tested result or a recommendation.

Hughes walks through an argument he uses with people. Imagine they are in a dream and he points to a flying saucer. Asked how far away it is, they say about eight feet, and they give the same answer even if they know it is a dream. Asked what it is made of, they might say aluminum. But, he says, "there's no aluminum in your brain." If he keeps asking, he says, people end up answering that it is made of themselves, of consciousness, and so are the eight feet between them and it.

He extends the argument to the senses. In a dream there are no photons, yet you see color. Your body and eyes are made up, yet you invent eyeballs to see through. And since there are no eight feet inside a brain, he concludes that "the distance is zero." His larger point is that any test you could run in waking life to prove something is real, like the picture of water in the studio, you could also run in a dream. So the distance between you and an object is made of consciousness and doesn't exist.

Rogan says it makes sense. He suggests that because we have tools and senses to measure distance, sound, and touch, we assume that is what the world is made of. Hughes adds that dreams have their own logic, where riding a rhinoceros to a pizza factory feels normal.

Hughes lists visual comparisons. He says a galaxy matches the shape of DNA, toroidal gravitational shapes match a red blood cell, and an eyeball seen up close looks like a nebula. He frames these conditionally: if "as above so below" is even remotely true, dreams might tell us more than we think about what we call reality.

Rogan brings up a side-by-side image of the known universe and human neural tissue. At first he isn't sure whether it shows a brain cell or another neural cell, and the image on screen is then identified as a brain cell next to the universe. He first calls them "identical," then hedges that "at least it looks like the same thing." The evidence here is a visual resemblance, not a measured one.

Rogan argues that infinity may be stranger than a universe with no edge. The whole infinite universe could be part of a cell inside another being in another infinite universe, repeating with no end. As "some evidence that that might be the case," he points to the strangeness of the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. He also mentions a recent guest, an astrophysicist whose name is transcribed as "Michelle Fowler." He says she described the universe getting stranger the deeper we look, including James Webb telescope findings that astronomers say shouldn't be there.

Rogan says these scientists think there is "a real possibility that inside every black hole is a completely new universe." He works through the implication. With hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, each with a supermassive black hole, passing through any one could lead to hundreds of billions more galaxies, which could contain creatures whose brain cells look like universes. He stresses that true infinity means no final level. All of this is a possibility as Rogan relays it, not an established finding.

Rogan ties Hughes's description of the ego reclaiming reality to what he sees as a problem today. He says people cling inseparably to ideologies, political parties, ethics, morals, or religion, partly from fear of how vast experience really is, and shield themselves by pretending to be sure. Hughes agrees and calls it a security blanket.

We need more people to say as far as we know before they say some shit.

Hughes allows that DMT experiences may be hallucinations. He quotes the phrase "death by astonishment," attributing it to Terence McKenna, whose name is transcribed as "Terrence McKinness." He argues that labeling anything in the DMT space is almost an act of destruction, because words are sounds that describe known reality. Rogan adds that language was invented for trading chickens and spices.

There's no words for it. They don't exist.

Hughes connects this back to his dream argument. He says quantum entanglement, which he describes as something people say can't be explained because it seems faster than light, could be explained if distance isn't real. He offers this as his own interpretation, without support from physics in the conversation.

Hughes moves away from what he calls "Super Woo-W" and asks about the UFC fight at the White House. Rogan calls it insane. He says he had worried about fighters dealing with heat, but the temperature seemed to be in the 70s and was perfect.

Rogan says there were weather warnings. The fights were scheduled to start at 8 p.m., and at one point a weather expert wanted to push the start to 10:30 p.m. Rogan says that would have been a disaster for a show he first puts at about six hours and then corrects to about five. He says the storm seemed to go around the White House. He ends with uncertainty: "I don't know if that's science or if that's consciousness."

This part of the episode includes paid sponsor reads that are separate from the interview: a Squarespace domain and website ad with a discount code, and a long BlueChew Gold ad with promotional pricing and a reference to its safety information. They make no claims about the topics discussed.

The transcript does not label speakers, but this stretch is told by someone who says he has called combat sports for two decades. He opens by admitting he had feared a storm would disrupt the fights. Those fears turned out to be groundless. He says he does not know "what steered the storm or if it's just random luck," and that a long ceremony with a jet flyover and music meant that by the time the fights began it was dark and the weather was "perfect."

His main point is the size of the event, which he says television could not convey. He describes two crowds. On the White House lawn there were "4,000 plus people": roughly a thousand military personnel standing at the back and more than 3,000 seated. Farther away, at a distance he first puts at 100 or 200 yards and then revises to "maybe 300 yards," was the Ellipse, where he says 85,000 people got in for free. They watched on giant screens with commentary and big sound systems, and could see the lights of the venue and the White House in the distance. He says you could hear both crowds, with the Ellipse roaring from far off.

I'm a hyperbolic individual, and I'm always like, this is the greatest, this is awesome. Like, that was the wildest experience that I've ever had in my 20, whatever years of calling combat sports.

He flags his own tendency to exaggerate, and he still calls it "the greatest night of fights of all time." His factual claim is that all seven fights ended by knockout, which he says made it the only night in the sport's history where that happened. The other person in the conversation reacts with surprise, and the host repeats "Unprecedented." Nothing in the conversation checks this record claim. Both speakers see the night as an ideal introduction for first-time viewers, and as a party for the free crowd on the Ellipse, where "the drinks are flowing." One of them sums it up as "What a 250th."

The other speaker notes that the sport was banned not long ago. The host then gives his own history with the UFC. He started working for it in 1997 and quit in 1998. In those years he had DirecTV only because it was the only way to watch the UFC. He came back in 2001, after Zuffa bought the company and the Fertitta brothers and Dana White started running it. At that time the UFC was banned from cable. His first commentary job for the UFC was "UFC 37 and a half," a special show for Fox Sportsnet meant to introduce people to the sport, and he says it was the first time the UFC was back on cable. After that came growing pay-per-view buys and momentum.

But even back then, like it was like you were doing porn or something or snuff films. Or you were doing something that was damaging for your career.

He contrasts that stigma with "25 years later," when the event was held on the White House lawn and was, in his words, "one of the most watched sporting events in the history of the world." He hedges the audience numbers. He says he does not know the total, but thinks it was "well over" 150 million views by Monday. He guesses that replays since then, up to the Tuesday of the conversation, have added "probably another 50 or 60 million." The other speaker says he bought Paramount Plus to watch, for what he remembers as "13 bucks or something," and only saw the first few fights.

The host calls the main event "the greatest fight of all time." The winner, Justin Gaethje, was by his account a six-to-one underdog "in many books." He calls those odds "crazy" for a former interim lightweight champion and BMF champion who had fought "the best of the best." He presents the odds as a measure of how highly Ilia Topuria was rated. In many people's eyes, he says, Topuria is the most skilled fighter of the new generation, which he calls the most skilled generation ever.

His round-by-round account goes like this. Topuria was "too much for a while" and almost finished Gaethje in the second round. Topuria seemed to have been badly hurt in the first or second round and had trouble seeing out of one eye. The host suggests that Topuria "really tried to finish Justin in the second," and that going all out like that can leave a fighter unable to recover between rounds. Gaethje did recover, and he "started battering Ilya in the third and fourth." Near the end of the fourth round, Gaethje held Topuria down and drove a knee into his rib cage. Topuria then retired on his stool.

Asked whether Topuria broke a rib, the host says it "probably could have happened." He thinks the eye damage was more significant. Both eyes were swollen shut, his nose was damaged, and it "looked like perhaps orbital damage," maybe a fractured orbital. Those are guesses from watching, not confirmed injuries. He frames the stoppage as a smart decision by "a very smart guy" who could not defend himself and chose to protect his body and brain and "come back another day."

when you can't see you can't see and when you're you're that battered Sometimes it's smart to stop

Part of what makes the story matter to him is context. He says Gaethje was 37, had been described as fighting his last fight, and had set himself the goal of winning the title at the White House as the end of his career. People told him it would not happen because of who he was facing.

The other speaker asks a broader question: what is the mental difference between a fighter who wins as an underdog, despite perhaps having less skill, and one who loses? The host says "there's a lot of factors." The first one he gives is physical. Gaethje has always been unusually durable, possibly for genetic reasons. He rarely gets cut, and he has joked about it himself.

science needs to take a look at this hard-ass skin I have.

He qualifies the durability point right away. Gaethje has been rocked, hurt and stopped before, including being knocked out by Max Holloway in the last second of the last round of a BMF title fight. He then turns to temperament. Gaethje "can lose because he's a human but he's not going to quit." He has been in chaotic five-round battles before, and "oddly he thrives" in them. He has been called "the most violent man" in "the most violent sport" ever since his UFC debut against Michael Johnson.

if you're looking for quit you go into a room it's empty the quit room has no one in it